Right Angle began as a column in the now-defunct Sunday magazine in November 1991. The column allowed me the luxury of presenting an alternative to the prevailing left-liberal consensus in India. It has become the implicit signature tune for all my subsequent writings.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Modi under modificationMost analyses of Modi are rooted in the debate surrounding the Ayodhya years, but both India and the man have changed

Biographies of individuals who could end up as the
Prime Minister of India have begun making their appearance in a pre-election
India gripped by political uncertainty. In the past year, for example, there
have been two attempts by three journalists to explain the life and politics of
Rahul Gandhi, the Congress Party’s media-shy heir apparent. Both books were
astonishing in one respect: the authors had never met nor spoken to the
Congress Vice President!

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay’s political biography of
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi does not short-change readers with such
brazenness. Yet, the fact that the author met the subject of his study for just
one lengthy session (he had, of course, interacted with him in earlier years
when Modi was a functionary at the BJP central office in Delhi) in May 2012 and
completed the back some nine months later suggests that ‘quickies’ are becoming
the norm in Indian publishing.

To do justice to his subject, a biographer needs to
certainly understand the wider environment in which the individual operates. He
certainly needs to engage exhaustively with friends, family, associates and
detractors of the person under scrutiny. But these are never a substitute for
getting under the skin of and understanding the mind of the subject. For a
person whose life is still a work in progress, this is a doubly complex
exercise that requires patience, perseverance and doggedness.

It is not that Mukhopadhyay hasn’t tried. He has
read most of the secondary articles and reports on Modi; he has spoken to those
who dislike Modi within the RSS family; and he has touched base with most of
Gujarat’s senior journalists. Indeed, like the reporter who is parachuted into
unknown territory, he has followed the drill: first talk to the taxi driver and
then imbibe the wisdom of local journalists.

There is only problem with this approach: the local
media (with some exceptions) is usually the least well-informed about the Chief
Minister. I have seen this in Orissa and I have experienced it in Gujarat. In
2002, for example, there were almost no takers for the couple of seats set
aside for media in the leader’s helicopter during the campaign. The media had
decided to boycott the ‘monster’, having convinced itself that he was going to
lose—a perception bolstered by spurious polls. In 2007, an Ahmedabad journalist
asked me to contribute an article on the theme: “Is 2007 Modi’s Waterloo?” And
in 2012, Delhi journalists were routinely told by their Gujarat colleagues that
the BJP would fall short of a majority.

Mukhopadhyay’s over-dependence on the local media
has inevitably led him to replicate the facile conclusions on which the Delhi chatterati
has depended in assessing Modi. I was struck, for example, by the complete
absence of any inputs from retired or serving bureaucrats on Modi’s approach to
administration. It was amusing to see the complete absence of accounts from
entrepreneurs and farmers on the business environment of Gujarat. Rather than
undertake rigorous groundwork, Mukhopadhyay has relied exclusively on reports
that suggest that Modi is no big deal. Likewise, the absence of any discernible
inputs from senior BJP figures, many of whom have a strange love-hate
relationship with him, is very noticeable. There are umpteen stories of the
years Modi spent in ‘exile’, dreaming of a return to Gujarat, and the way he
handled the post-2002 assault by the Prime Minister’s Office that would have
enriched the of the man. Equally, Mukhopadhyay does not provide any insights
into Modi’s troubled relationship with the RSS establishment and how he
prevailed.

The fundamental mistake of this biography lies in
the belief that the Modi who was an important functionary during the Hindutva
mobilisation from the late-1980s to the mid-1990s is the same man who now
aspires to be Prime Minister. This is a common mistake of those who covered the
Ayodhya movement and were convinced that fascism was round the corner in India.

The most interesting story to be told is how Modi
clobbered the likes of Togadia, insulated himself from the RSS’
micro-management and coped with the unrelenting hostility of the Indian
Establishment. The Modi who found himself thrust into the unlikely role of ‘Chhote
Sardar’ in 2002, redefined the terms on which he would be judged subsequently.
In believing, like many still do, that the rise and rise of Narendra Modi is a
consequence of crude identity politics is to misread the man completely. Modi’s
critics, it would seem, are still judging him on the terms of a debate that
surrounded the Ayodhya years. Since then, India has changed, Modi has changed
but his detractors are caught in a time warp.

In assessing the “The Times’ which shaped Modi,
Mukhopadhyay overlooked the post-1991 economic transformation of India. The
vicious 2002 riots were the last gasp of the old politics. What matters is
subsequent events, themes that this book leaves under-explored.

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About Me

The Right is an endangered community in India's English-language media. I happen to be one of the few to have retained a precarious toehold in the mainstream media. I intend this blog as a sounding board of ideas and concerns.
You can read the details of my education, professional experience and political inclinations on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swapan_Dasgupta).
RIGHT ANGLE is an archive of my published articles. USUAL SUSPECTS is my blog.